Engines: Abstract expressionism

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, April 15, 2008

As any of you know who have recently opened the hood of a car and looked at what is in there, automobile engine compartments have become almost the mechanical equivalent of the abstract expressionism of an insane painter.

Matter of fact, after staring in there for several minutes, one begins to suspect that, instead of an engine designed by engineers, what is in there is instead an experiment with insane-asylum patrons bobbing for excess car parts.

That’s an engine? That thing sitting sideways in there, hooked up to more wires and tubes than an octopus has legs?

For the last couple of weeks, the subject has been car mileage, and why we don’t get it, no matter how hard modern car design has tried.

This involves first defining some terms. There are two of them: the first is enthalpy; the second is entropy.

Enthalpy refers to how much energy is stored within some system. Entropy refers instead to how much energy is unavailable within some system. Typically, enthalpy is much simpler, as simple for example as the fact that humid air has more energy than dry air because it contains water, which can get tricky and change state when you’re not looking. When and if it does that, energy must either be absorbed to cause that to happen, or yielded when it happens naturally.

Lake water evaporating would be a natural occurrence; dehumidifying air for better comfort is a man-made change, and takes energy.

More or less, that’s just one simple example of enthalpy.

But entropy, that’s a little harder. As systems change — and here we’re talking about more complex systems, and one good example of that would be modern automobiles — less energy becomes available to do the work that the system was originally intended to do.

An example here will better illustrate entropy. When mankind in the form of the barbarian hordes moved into mainland Europe for the first time, they did so for several reasons. Man had finally figured out fire.

Fire was pretty neat, they thought. It could cook meat, and it could keep people from freezing to death. There was plenty of game to cook, being as how most of that area was covered in forest, and it was pretty cold, a lot colder than where they had been down south.

Now picture a village, crude shelters within which food was cooked by firewood from trees that were all around, food cooked by people kept warm by burning trees that were all around. (Have you ever been to a campground, and went looking in the woods for a few sticks for kindling? Fat chance of finding any. Previous searchers scrounged them all up, didn’t they.)

In the same way, with lots to eat, and no one freezing out of the gene pool, the population expanded, which required more trees to be chopped down. (The twigs and dead branches probably went quickly.)

There’s only one problem now: all the trees are further away, and further, and further, until man can no longer make it on his own. Along comes the wheel, and the ox, which requires some specialization, and more work.

Pretty quickly (Well, not real, real quickly, but considering the age of the planet, and how long it takes to grow a tree, quickly nonetheless.), the trees are all gone, but fortunately, coal is discovered. Only it’s far away, and down deep in the ground. Luckily, we invent steam machines, and they can dig. But they’re complicated, compared to stepping outside your hut and busting off a couple of branches for a fire.

The coal is not only a long way off, which means you need to build a railroad to haul it, and locomotives and stuff, but it’s down in the ground where it’s wet, and there’s no air to breath, so we pump water out, and air down — all with complex, expensive, new machinery.

The definition of entropy: the amount of energy unavailable for work, which, as a system changes, increases.

And that in short is why in fifty years, automobile mileage hasn’t really gotten much better.

As I pointed out before, there are other reasons, like entrenched technology that doesn’t like to change, because people really don’t like to change, and because big money likes the status quo.

But the fact that humans are killing ourselves because of the noxious emissions coming from cars means we have to put complex emission stuff on cars that takes a lot of the horsepower away, and increases the overall complexity of the machine.

Which means more energy unavailable to that system called an automobile.

At more expense.

The next time you see a train full of coal going by, you’ll know you’re seeing the very essence of entropy in action, all while you’re sitting in an automobile demonstrating the very same thing.

Alan Linda writes from his New York Mills home.